The Hubble Space Telescope has discovered the first organic molecule on a planet that's not in our solar system. According to NASA, this breakthrough could be a major step toward discovering life on other planets. Scientists believe that the organic compound detected, methane, can be an integral part in the chemical reactions considered necessary to form life as we know it.
The discovery was made on a planet called HD 189733b, which is 63 light-years away from Earth in the constellation Vulpecula. Hubble also confirmed the existence of water molecules in the planet's atmosphere--a discovery made by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope in 2007.
The planet is called a "hot Jupiter" because it is about the size of the giant planet in our solar system but is closer to its sun than planet Mercury is to ours. It takes the planet just two days to orbit its sun. Its temperature is about 1,700 degrees Fahrenheit, considered to be too hot for life as we know it. But this discovery means that methane and other compounds can probably be identified on other, more Earth-like, planets somewhere in the galaxy.
That is awesome! We did a whole Mars day in organic chemistry a few weeks ago, talking about life on other plants and how it would be detected... Ahhh science!
Wow, this is really cool. Just like it said that is way too hot to support life, but maybe some kind of weird species actually live there and they have adapted to that kind of conditions. I really doubt it, but that would be really cool.
You see that's why we explore space more then we do the ocean floor because we already know that giant squids exist, but we don't know if there's other life out there. Also, think about this, what if we do find some kind of super advanced civilization and you're able to travel there, and then you can explore their ocean floor and they'll probably have some kind of super giant squid. Haha, I thinking to much outside the box.
That's quite interesting, I just read several articles related to it. Methane seems like it would be quite abundant, since it is Carbon and Hydrogen, which are very readily available in the universe. I think we might be really reaching the limits of our current technology with this find. I feel that the only reason this was discovered is because of how hot the planet is. I couldn't find any technical articles, but usually compounds such as this are found because of their emission line spectrum - and that would only have been visible because of the heat there. It's not inconceivable that life would be there. It's cold conditions that really slow down the chemical processes that lead to life, so if this temperature is within the threshold of chemical reaction performance, then there could be life. Something else to consider is that nearly every planet in our solar system has methane, and several have water in some form. That means that there could be other planets closer towards the "green zone" of this alien sun which would be perfect for life. It would be incredibly hard to detect a planet there, and even harder (if not impossible) to determine its chemical make-up, but I'm glad astronomers aren't just sitting on their hands.
The universe is way too big for only one race. There is not yet a single intelligent life form discovered by humans, and as far a I know, no intelligent life on Earth. We have to realize that humans are not special in any way.